


Mothballs and Wine

by FriendlyCurse



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-29
Updated: 2015-05-29
Packaged: 2018-04-01 18:46:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4030636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FriendlyCurse/pseuds/FriendlyCurse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She only has to spend one weekend in the awful house of her crazy old uncle to get her inheritance. It's worth it, right?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Friday

As much as she wanted to say the house hadn’t changed over the years there was no way to deny the truth. No amount of imagination or desperate clinging to memories could do more than make the facts more obvious. The house was a shithole. With a heavy sigh she fidgeted with her cellphone and dragged her suitcase up the crumbling concrete walkway to the cracked planks and bricks serving as steps and onto the dangerously unstable covered back porch. The support posts wobbled as she inched to the weathered old door. Each nervous step accompanied by a creak and a groan.

Once again the possibility of arranging a hotel and calling the whole thing off became undeniably tempting. Aside from bad memories of miserable summers there was the knowledge her grouchy old uncle died in the house last week. The only reason she had to sleep in the rusty old bed upstairs she’d once occupied as a child was the knowing even a cheap motel would empty most of her savings by the time she got home. That and the inheritance. 

The old badger claimed to be wealthy, something she seriously doubted as she unlocked the door and turned the protesting knob. She still had to put her shoulder into it to shove the door open. It was a relief to get off the porch that shuddered under her feet with the impact. Sighing, she started to close the door behind her but wrinkled her nose and left it open. This was quickly followed by as many windows as she could get to open though most had to be propped to stay that way. Everything seemed to be either stuck closed or open. Even the cabinets around were one of the two. She kicked one of the doors only to have it bounce back and bump her shin. 

How could anyone with money live like this? The stench of mothballs was even more overwhelming than she remembered and she swore her first task would be to locate and dispose of every last one of them. There were rumors of eccentric millionaires who lived in virtual poverty and she hoped this was the case. She had to spend the weekend here to get her full inheritance - whatever that might be. Her uncle’s will had stated she could either have five hundred dollars or split the rest with her brother. He got the same deal, if one took the five hundred, the rest went to the one who stayed the weekend.

David was nowhere to be seen so she was stuck making the house somewhat liveable on her own, holding her breath between rooms as she tried to pry windows open. She always hated the mothballs her uncle apparently loved. The heavy stench permeated everything and even when they finally got to go home at the end of the summer everything they took held that smell for months. Her parents ignored all begging and sent them back every year since the bus tickets were cheaper than a babysitter and easier than trusting the two to stay out of trouble while they were at work. 

The interior had degenerated considerably since those horrible years. She moved away from home over a decade ago and had enjoyed her summers ever since, rarely even thinking about old Uncle Mothballs. She had been shocked when she got the phone call about her uncle passing away since he had been old and not in the best of health back then. She thought he’d quietly died and her mother never got around to mentioning it.

It looked like very little had been moved around when they removed the body from the living room. He lived a fairly sparse life as such things go and there was room enough to get a stretcher between the shabby pieces of furniture. She wasn’t sure where he was found and decided not to sit on any of the furniture at all… just in case. The thought of sitting where he'd been gave her the heebie-jeebies. The old man died in his sleep from what she’d heard. He fell asleep watching TV and that was the end of it. What blew her mind was that the television worked at all. It was one of those ancient monsters encased in a cabinet. The familiar clunky old dials were incapable of reaching the number of channels that exist now, absolutely incapable of connecting to satellite.

A vintage radio sat beside the antique record player on a table that had certainly seen better days. She smiled faintly as she remembered the chaotic mess of scribbles on the bottom of that table where she’d gotten bored while playing with a box of crayons. It would be a shock if he’d found out and bothered to clean it off. That was over twenty years ago…

Taking a deep breath of the clean, cool breeze blowing in the window now, she hurried to the next room. The bathroom. She shuddered and again considered letting her meager savings go rather than deal with this. It wasn’t the kind of disgusting seen on some reality TV shows but clearly he hadn’t purchased a bottle of bleach since the year David slipped and fell on the stairs. There was only a small cut on his forehead but the amount of blood that poured out terrified her. It had gotten everywhere and they spent the better part of two days trying to clean it all up. The floorboards soaked up quite a bit by the time they got to start cleaning and she could still see dark splotches where even straight bleach hadn’t been enough.

She tugged the window open and set a shampoo bottle on the ledge to prop it open, gasping for fresh air as she leaned out to avoid breathing in any of the grime and possible mold of that horrible little room. As she took a deep breath hands grabbed her waist and a short scream escaped before she heard familiar laughter. David released her and leaned against the door cackling. He hadn’t changed at all, ever the prankster.

“Damn it, David, I could have slipped!” She glared at him which only made him laugh harder.

“You should have seen your face!” He gasped, finally making an effort to control himself. “I wouldn’t have let you fall.”

She sighed, cringed, took another deep breath through the window and shoved him out into the hall before making her way to the kitchen which she hoped was aired out by now. The stench had died down a bit but was still clinging to the air. It was more tolerable, though. 

“How did you even manage to sneak up on me?” She demanded of her still chortling brother. “This has to be one of the noisiest houses I’ve ever set foot in.”

“Not my fault you walk heavy.” He grinned. “Good idea opening windows, though. What do you want to bet he left us a mothball factory? He had to at least be a major investor in one… It’s going to be like an Easter egg hunt finding all of them. Less rewarding, though.”

“Did you just call me fat?” She snapped.

“Did you just admit to being insecure?” He countered, dodging a punch. “Walking heavy and _being_ heavy are different. Besides, the floorboards sag and you can tell where the support beams are. I walked carefully, that’s all.”

“Rock-Paper-Scissors to see who has to go upstairs to open windows?” She asked.

“I don’t mind the smell as much as you do.” He pointed out with a smirk. "But it's kinda nice down here..."

“What about the locked room?” She asked, mirroring the smirk as he realized one of their greatest questions would be answered. They shared a room with a curtain nailed up in the middle to create some semblance of privacy while the two other rooms remained locked. One was their uncle’s bedroom, the other… he never would say. They were simply told to stay away from it and the old man was so serious, so intense, when he spoke they had been too afraid to go near the door for years. 

Once David worked up the courage to look through the keyhole but it was too dark to see anything on the other side. She tossed him the keyring she had been given by the lawyer. While she intended to let him tell her the grand tales of their uncle’s junk room, he had other plans and grabbed her hand. He dragged her up the groaning steps that threatened to give out under them in spite of her protests.

The smell was as bad as it had been downstairs and she quickly opened the windows at the ends of the slanted hall that separated the long room they stayed in under one of the gables from the two larger rooms. She didn’t know what to expect to find behind any of the doors now and hesitated to open them. Her brother headed straight for the forbidden rooms. 

“Wow…” He said uncertainly as he pushed open the unlocked door to their uncle’s room and turned the light on. 

She edged closer to look in and frowned. Blank walls were discolored in streaks from a leak in the roof. The bed was plain, dingy sheets and a threadbare blanket that might have once been blue was now a muted gray in the light of a single dim bulb. The closet door hung open to show neat rows of shirts and pants hanging in pairs. No guesswork as to what he would have worn the next day. Or the day after. Or the day after that. It was spooky in a sad way. 

A single nightstand held only a mostly empty bottle of whiskey. There was no dresser, no mirror. Aside from two pairs of loafers that looked older than her, the closest the room had to decoration was a liberal scattering of mothballs along the edges of the wall and piled up in the corners.

“This is just depressing.” She said and shook her head. 

“It’s like a prison room.” David said, closing the door. “Weird.”

He went to try the other room but this was locked as it always had been. After going through most of the keys on the ring they found the right one. David smiled indulgently as he pushed the door open and felt for the lightswitch.

They stared in silence for a moment.

“Damn…” David stepped in and looked around the grotesque room. There were shelves full of old books, taxidermy, framed pictures of demonic creatures, bottles and jars filled with unidentifiable things. Both windows that should have been visible were boarded up, painted over and had those hideous pictures hanging from them.There was nothing about that room that made her feel safe or comfortable. “Our uncle was a freak… come look at this.”

“No way. You have fun in there, I’m going back downstairs.” She said and spun on her heel. It no longer mattered to her in the slightest what had happened to the room they used to sleep in, the room across from that morbid place. No wonder they were told to stay away! She decided to get as many mothballs out of the kitchen as possible and make a quick trip to the nearest department store to buy a sleeping bag. She had no intention of walking up those stairs again and as soon as the weekend was over she was heading straight back home with whatever money she could get. She hoped there was more than the house to be shared. It was distinctly possible the place would be condemned and end up costing more than the money they would get to dispose of. Her only real comfort was that she would get at least five hundred dollars out of this mess. This trip would cost nearly that much due to losing hours at work and paying for the gas to make the trip.

By the time she emptied the little dustpan three times and hauled the bag of offensive white pellets and half rotted bits of food her uncle left behind to the dumpster it was starting to get dark. She called up to her brother to let him know she’d be back soon and went to get camping gear. 

Shortly after she returned and started sweeping again David came back downstairs, nose buried in a stained and worn old book. She rolled her eyes and kept sweeping. It was clear the old man didn’t do more than absolutely necessary, there had to be a few years worth of dust and fallen food caked in the corners and between floorboards. It was disgusting but all she could do was set up her sleeping bag as far from the food prep area as possible. Without the mothball stink dominating the room she could smell something he dropped and hadn’t cleaned up. That or there was a dead mouse in the cabinets somewhere. 

She shuddered. “If he leaves us the house you can keep it.” 

“What, you don’t want in on this beautiful fixer-upper?” He asked sarcastically. “Man, he had some weird ideas… I found a bunch of his journals up there. It looks like he was determined to find a way to become immortal.”

“Are you serious?” She rolled her eyes. “Some people watch way too many movies.”

“Yeah, but it does explain some of that weird stuff upstairs. You didn’t see the half of it from out there in the hall.” 

“I’ll probably sleep better for that.”

“Yeah, you always were a wimp.” He grinned and deflected the broom as it swung for his head. “Seriously though, he’s got a serious collection of some books that have to be pretty rare. I looked up a couple and there are collectors paying upwards of three hundred dollars for copies regardless of the condition.”

“Really?” She smiled. “Well let’s sell all that stuff and split the money. The sooner it’s gone the better.”

“You aren’t even a little bit curious about any of it?” He asked incredulously. 

“No way. Whether it turned our uncle into a creepy, crazy old man or he bought it because that’s just the way he was it clearly didn’t improve matters and I don’t want anything to do with any of it.” She said firmly, sweeping another cloud of dirt and dried up bits of food out the door. 

“Well, since you don’t want crazy cooties I’ll just give you half of whatever I do sell. It might be worth hanging on to a few books in case the value goes up.” He grinned. 

“Whatever. I just want to get out of this stinking place and forget all about our summers here.”

“They weren’t _all_ bad.” He said with a shrug. 

“Mostly because if it wasn’t raining we were outside and pretending we were anywhere else!” 

“Beside the point.”

She rolled her eyes again and looked around. The smell had faded enough she didn’t feel like she was choking on the air anymore but it would take more than a couple of days to get the place to her standard of living. Tolerable would have to do. She got her sleeping bag settled along with the big, fluffy new pillow. 

“What will you do if rats show up?” David asked with a wide grin. 

“Shut up.”


	2. Saturday

She woke with her stomach gurgling and twisting in knots. The smells… After an afternoon of the damned mothballs and the night of whatever the stink in the kitchen was, she wanted nothing more than to go sit in the back yard against the fence and pretend she was anywhere but there the way she did as a child. 

The only good smell was coffee. She opened her eyes and almost smiled - David had cleaned up the coffeepot and brewed some morning bliss. Still feeling awful, she struggled to sit up, pulled the sleeping bag tight around her, hopped to the table and sat in one of the dusty chairs. 

“You sound like an elephant when you do that.” David smirked. 

“Shut up and hand me something that will make me not want to strangle you.” She grumbled. 

“Couldn’t find any vodka so I guess coffee will have to do.” He laughed, pouring her a cup and setting it along with sugar and a mostly full jug of milk in front of her.

“You went to the store?” She asked hopefully.

“Yeah, you think that room was creepy you should look in the fridge. Even _I_ cringed. You were sleeping heavy so I went to grab some milk.”

“Just milk?” She frowned suspiciously at the fragrant brown liquid that almost overrode the other smells in the room.

“Yeah, part of our inheritance seems to be some particularly good coffee. He had expensive taste and I’m not going to let that go unappreciated.” He grinned, taking a drink of his. “Since you ruin yours with milk I figured I’d be a good brother and enable your bad habits.”

She made a face at him and got her coffee fixed up. It  _was_ surprisingly good. Three cups later she was ready to shed her sleeping bag and get back to making the house livable. At least she told herself she was ready. She still ended up walking in circles around the lower floor assessing the work to be done while holding her breath as long as she could. The wind couldn’t blow hard enough to make the house smell fresh. Finally, with a new bag in the trash can and her cell phone playing music as loud as it could go, she began sweeping again. 

 

* * *

 

By lunch she was exhausted and the trash can was almost full of dirt and mothballs. She had to haul the whole thing out to the alley whole. The bag was too heavy to lift out without the plastic shredding. She tied it closed, hefted it up and let the bag slide out to burst in the safe confines of the dumpster. 

She trudged back in and collapsed into one of the kitchen chairs. It was tempting to yell at David, he disappeared upstairs about the time she started working. Lazy coward. It wouldn’t do any good to insult him out loud since he knew it as well as she did, he just cared less.

All thoughts of criticism and insult vanished when he came through the kitchen door a little while later with two pizza boxes and a case of soda. She grinned, snatching the pizza away. “You are my favorite person right now.” 

“I bet. I’d say the place smells better but it’s mostly just slightly less bad.”

She grumbled at him around a mouthful of melted cheese and pepperoni. The other pizza was smothered with olives and onions since he knew she hated those. The stingy jerk wanted a whole pizza all to himself. Her irritation didn’t hold up under the brief moment of normality of greasy fast food her uncle NEVER purchased for them. It allowed her a momentary escape from the reality of their situation. 

“So… I’ve been reading the journals…” David said between bites, his mirth fading a little. “He was already pretty weird when we started coming. He put forth a lot of effort to hide his occult studies from us. Did you know there’s a basement? He’s got an alchemy lab. An actual  _real_ alchemy lab!”

“What, he was trying to turn lead into gold?” She scoffed.

“No, turns out that’s some kind of metaphor. He was the lead and turning into gold is attaining perfection. To him perfection included immortality. It’s so weird to read what amounts to him talking to himself, giving himself pep talks when he fails. Obviously he mostly failed but he was stubborn. Had we found that journal he’d have been locked away within the first few days of us visiting.”

“That’s comforting.” She said sourly. They spent their summers with a potentially dangerous madman.

“It’s like watching a video and realizing that the whoosh you heard was a bullet that zipped right past your head.” He grinned, laughing as she glared at him. “Come on! It’s funny in retrospect. I want to check out that basement, don’t you?”

“No way! Are you crazy? I just want to stay here in the kitchen where it’s safe until I can go home with enough money to pay for the therapy I’m going to need after this.”

“ _SO_ easily traumatized.” He rolled his eyes. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”

“Attached to a remote control. I’d rather watch from a safe and comfortable couch.”

“I swear… you have to have been adopted.” He shook his head. “Not sure where the door leading to the basement is, it’s not outside…”

“You’d think we would have come across it at some point.” She agreed uncertainly. They explored everything but the two forbidden rooms and never saw any other doors.

“Well, we know it has to be inside on the first floor somewhere.” He said then shoved the rest of the slice he was holding in his mouth. He added something else but it was impossible to tell what. Still trying to chew he headed toward the living room. 

“Some day you will grow up.” She sighed. 

“NEVER!” He managed around his mouthful of food. 

 

* * *

 

She let him wander the house, preferring to stay in the kitchen. She found some dusty cleaning supplies under the sink and got enough of the dirt wiped away from everything she didn’t feel horrible simply sitting in the room. The bathroom got a quick scrub so she could stand to be in there as well. Aside from that she avoided poking around too much. 

David, on the other hand, was convinced there was a hidden door somewhere and walked around looking for latches and complaining there weren’t any sconces on the wall to turn. On breaks he had a few journals he brought down to skim in the hopes of finding some mention of the location to the door. However much she tried to ignore him, focusing on the games on her cell, his increasingly serious mood was worrisome. The more he read the less often he smiled and the more he flicked nervous glances in her direction. 

"What?!" She finally demanded. 

"He talks about us... A lot." He said hesitantly. "By the time we were in high school he was into some... some pretty dark stuff. Shit... We got really lucky. He thought about trying some bizarre spells that would require him killing us. The only reason he didn't was he couldn't figure out how to manage it without the cops figuring out something happened."

"Seriously?" She asked nervously. There had always been the question of why he invited them to stay every summer. He clearly didn't like either of them much and they both figured their parents just  _said_ he invited them. Unless David suddenly became a much better actor, this was the answer and it made the house all the more foreboding. Even though their uncle was dead it felt like the house had absorbed his quiet homicidal insanity.  _One more day..._ She reminded herself.

"I can't believe he actually thought about this..." David said, pushing the book away. He stood and paced, not putting forth the effort to avoid all the loose floorboards. They creaked and groaned to create a nerve racking accompaniment to his thoughts.

One of the things she noticed while cleaning was the shelf of wine behind one of the broken cabinet doors. She couldn't remember ever encountering a better situation for heavy drinking and grabbed one of the bottles. The corkscrew was beside the sink, one of the few items she found that was spotlessly clean from the start.

The wine was bittersweet, a little unusual but not bad. It was stronger than most wines she drank and it suited her just fine. Classic rock, a strong drink and the sunset. There was enough wine to stay drunk until Monday morning when she could leave the house, sober up and head home with a lot of money.

Let David worry about the might-have-been's, all that matters is sticking around one more day. She did her best to remind herself the past was gone and couldn’t hurt her but any time she heard the thump and rustle of him searching or saw him turning pages with a worried frown it brought the anxiety back. It didn’t help that once the pizza ran low the pungent, funky smell of the kitchen resumed pressing on her awareness. 

She finished the wine and stretched out on her sleeping bag where she could do her best to let the music steal her away.

 

 

* * *

 

She woke late in the night still drunk but dangerously close to ‘only tipsy’. She got up and shuffled to the cabinet to grab another bottle of wine. David was sitting at the table reading. He no longer seemed particularly concerned about the contents of the book and she figured he was just desensitized at this point. After refilling her glass she held the bottle out to him. He gave it a strange look and shook his head. 

“Only drinking fancy wines from reputable vineyards now?” She snickered. According to the label this was made in some little vineyard nearby. She hadn’t even known there was a winery but since this wasn’t a strong agricultural area chances of great wine were slim to none. It was no wonder the stuff wasn’t particularly tasty but alcohol was alcohol. As long as it got her drunk she’d put up with the metallic flavor. The wine was clearly not aged in wood barrels.

“Never did acquire a taste for wine. Beer and liquor are the way to go.” He said distractedly as he turned another page.

“More for me.” She smirked and returned to her sleeping bag with the glass and bottle.

  
  



	3. Sunday

The sun was a cruel and spiteful thing, her uncle was a bastard who never bothered to hang curtains and the wine went sour  fast once opened. She wrinkled her nose as the harsh smell from the bottle added itself to the rest of the unpleasantness in the room. She dumped the wine remaining in the bottle she’d passed out drinking and grabbed another off the shelf. Being drunk the rest of this awful trip seemed like an even more fantastic idea than it had the day before. She couldn’t blame her uncle for being a drunk.

There was no sign of David though his truck was in the driveway next to her car. He was probably upstairs and welcome to his kingdom of creepiness all the way up those noisy, splintery stairs. She giggled and kicked back in the cleanest of the chairs in the kitchen. The bottle was half empty when David came in looking tired but cheerful.

“I found the basement!”

“In the attic? He was backwards….” She giggled. “Attic.”

“No, you lush, it’s in the broom closet!” He laughed. 

“What?” She blinked at him, trying to comprehend what he said. The broom closet was barely large enough to stand in. They hadn’t both been able to fit in there at the same time as children. It was barely large enough for a broom,  mop, dust pan and bucket. Even then the dustpan only fit because it was mostly flat. 

“I know!” He said with a wide grin. “There was so much dirt in the back it hid the hinges. There isn’t a proper handle, just a fingerhold gouged out of the wood. You have to empty everything out to open the trap door and it’s a bit of a tight squeeze thanks to years of good food… but it’s incredible down there!”

“Incredibubble…” She snickered, shaking her head. “You haff fun wi’ that.”

“Seriously, it’s not even nine in the morning.” He said with a raised eyebrow. “Should you be drinking already?”

“Still.” She nodded, pouring another glass. “Still ‘til I can go.”

“Thought I was supposed to be the zany, irresponsible one.” He shook his head and dropped into the seat beside hers. “The journals are getting harder to read. He believed he was making some serious progress, thought he had it figured out.”

“Immortality?” She rolled her eyes and drained the glass in one gulp.

“Yeah. Thing is, he was sick all the time. It cut into his research and once he started getting cataracts there wasn’t a whole lot he could do. His writing is virtually illegible… but… I think his theory is sound.”

“Wha-?” It took a moment for the implications to sink in. He believed their crazy uncle?

“I know, I know… sounds weird but I looked through the books he was referencing and… it makes sense. It’s dangerous, of course… but I think he may have gotten it figured out.”

“Don’ be stupid.” She muttered. “Be drunk then be rish…”

“I’ll get drunk later.” He said, watching her sloppily pour another glass. “You… you just have fun with that.”

She giggled and watched as he opened the trap door in the broom closet and descended into their crazy uncle’s hidden basement. So many years of hide and seek… she hadn’t given much thought to the gouged out chunk in the floorboard.

 

* * *

 

She woke and looked around in confusion. Dark, unfamiliar shapes. The world was spinning and her stomach was churning. The muddled haze of a couple bottles of wine made it even harder to sort out what she was seeing. Bottles… bottles, jars… weird things… jars of weird things… David…. the stench… her stomach lurched and she turned her head to vomit. That was all she could do - she couldn’t move anything but her head and neck. 

Once she no longer had anything on her stomach she tried to make sense of the bottles and jars and… bones. Her neck was craned uncomfortably but she couldn’t move, couldn’t look away. Bones, skulls, rotting flesh, tattered clothes… shriveled eyes and gaping mouths, dead people looking back at her forever trapped in a moment of terror. 

“David…” She tried to scream but it was barely a whisper. 

“He couldn’t see, he was in so much pain… he didn’t finish. He figured it out too late.” David said calmly from nearby. “A basement full of failure with the belated scrawled notes that point the way to eternal life and power. As crazy as it sounds he’s right.”

“What…?” She tore her eyes away from the stacked bodies rotting quietly in the corner, those on bottom little more than bones, the ones near the top still crawling with maggots. 

“Blood is the key.” David grinned and picked up a small cage from a nearby table. Inside a furious rat scurried and snapped at fingers well out of its reach. “This rat hasn’t been fed in five years. Its last meal was the one that gave it immortality. Meat treated with a certain potion. One he brewed for that rat with the blood of its mother. He made a new batch and bottled it. Waiting for an excuse to get us back here to finish the spell. If he’s right… he may have lost his chance but it will still work.” 

“What?” She struggled to move, the look in his eyes terrified her. David didn’t look like himself and how was he not horrified by this place? She forced her eyes to her immobile arms. She was on a narrow table with a board across the top. Her arms were wrapped heavily in duct tape to secure her to the board, her legs similarly taped to the table. “Wha’s happening, David?”

“You’re going to help me.” He said with a smile as he picked up a knife. “Hold still. You’ve already had quite a lot of the potion today. Now I just need your heart.”

  
  



End file.
